Broughton Islands 2013

Ann and Curt go kayaking in the land of the Kwakwaka'wakw. The Kwakwaka'wakw people live on the north end of Vancouver Island and on the nearby islands; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwakawakw. They are the traditional enemies of the Salish-speaking tribes of Puget Sound and of the Haida, Tlingit, and other coastal tribes further north. This was a Sierra Club trip in August 2013.

The Broughton Islands are at the northeast end of Vancouver Island. Ann and I drove up with our boats and met the other participants at Telegraph Cove. The others were from all around the US, from New Hampshire to California. The yellow line is the route I paddled according to my GPS (except for the last leg back to Telegraph Cove, which was by water taxi). The pins show our camps (red) and special places we visited (green). We were out for six days and five nights.

It's 400 miles and about 12 hours of driving from Seattle to Telegraph Cove. Two hours of that is a ferry ride from Tsawassen to Nanaimo. This was the first ferry ride for our new yellow boats. This was also the last sunny day until we got back to Seattle.

The nights before and after the six-day kayak trip we stayed in a room overlooking the Telegraph Cove harbor. This place--the Wastell House--was the home of the manager of the local sawmill before WWII. The sawmill made boxes for shipping dried salmon to Japan. Many of the workers' houses are still used for tourist lodging.

The next morning we packed up our boats and headed out. There are over 5,000 kayak launches a year from this ramp in Telegraph Cove, about half being people on guided trips. A local company, North Island Kayak, http://www.northislandkayak.ca/, provided the boats and gear for the other participants, as well as two excellent guides, Brad and Bree. (FYI, the Sierra Club's insurance forbids them from doing water trips with boats owned by the Sierra Club, so trips like this are run with a concessionaire providing boats.)

After a few hours of paddling, including a lunch stop, we arrived at Spyhop Beach. The only non-fun part of expedition kayaking is carrying the boats above the high-tide line at every camp. A single requires four people to carry, a double six.

It's hard to get good photos of whales from a kayak because expensive SLRs and saltwater don't mix well. It takes only a few seconds for a whale to surface, blow, and dive, and your camera is usually still in its drybag. However, we saw dozens of humpbacks, and lesser numbers of orcas, Pacific whitesided dophins, seals, and other such critters. We saw one humpback come completely out of the water and land with a sound like thunder. Ann had a humpback surface about 100 feet from her. That makes an impression, since these guys are 30-50 feet long and in the 70,000 pound range. Their rather pungent breath also makes an impression if you're downwind from a blow.

The second day we crossed Johnstone Straight in fog and visited a whale observatory at Boat Bay. We then returned to Spyhop Beach for a second night there. This was our longest day of paddling, around 14 miles round trip. Johnstone Strait is known for winds and rough water, but we had calm for all three of our crossings.

We ate lunch inside the whale observation hut at Boat Bay. People here keep counts of the whales passing by and also report anyone entering the closed waters of Robson Bight Ecological Preserve, http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/eco_reserve/robsonb_er.html, directly across Johnstone Strait from Boat Bay. The native warden here taught me how to pronounce Kwakwaka'wakw, which had been troubling my linguistic gene for some years. The w's are aspirated puffs of air without much sound. Kwakwaka'wakw means "the people who speak Kwak'wala", which is a very gutteral language with some sounds that seem to come from somewhere below the larnyx. There are about 600 native speakers left.

On the third day we crossed Johnstone Strait again and camped on a First Nations (Indian) Reservation on Compton Island. Normally you can't land on an Indian reservation, but on Compton there is an very entrepreneurial Mamalilaculla native, Tom, who runs this camp for tourists. (The Mamalilaculla are a sub-group of the Kwakwaka'wakw people). You can stay in these huts or camp in the woods as we did. Tom is, shall we say, quite a character. As he told us, "White folks are like fish farms: they aren't going away so we might as well learn to get along with them." (and turn a profit in the process; more power to him on that). Tom runs an eco-tourism/native experience company, http://www.aboriginaladventurescanada.com/, and has his own TV show in Canada. He's longwinded and opinionated (positive traits he shares with me), and he's a wealth of native legends and knowledge, which he is happy to share with gringos. We'll see more of him later on....

This is typical Broughton Islands scenery: lots of small rocky islands and an occasional wide channel to cross. The tides here around 12-15 feet, so the currents can be very strong (up to 5 knots). The winds can be very strong as well. This is not really a beginners' kayaking venue, unless you're in a double with a guided group.

The Sierra Club leader had arranged a tour of a fish farm at Swanson Island, near the mouth of Knight Inlet. The company, Marine Harvest, sent one of their big guns to give us a good tour and make sure we heard their side of the story. I've always had a low opinion of fish farms, but I'm glad to say that this one seems to be ecologically very well run. The farm is a good 600 yards long and has about 600,000 Atlantic salmon at any one time. The fish are harvested when they reach 11 pounds (5 kg). The inset is fish about 2 feet long seen in an underwater camera.

This is looking up Knight Inlet from the fish farm. The wind was 15-20 knots and forecast to increase to 25 kt, and the current was 3 kt, so it was too rough for us to cross safely. The water here is about 45 deg F, so it's not a good place to go bottom up (only Ann and I had full dry suits). We therefore changed our original plan and headed back to more sheltered waters. Remember: It is always better to be on land wishing you were kayaking than to be kayaking and wishing you were on land.

Many places in the Broughton Islands have small frame shelters where you can put up a tarp roof and cook out of the rain. These are often constructed and maintained by commerical kayak companies. The camps all had pit toilets.

Here I am in between rain storms at the Maggy Point camp. Just before dinner, a big black bear swam from the island behind me to our camp. However, when he saw me he knew he was about to tangle with a really tough dude, so he headed into the forest never to be seen again.

This is Tom. He is also the native warden on Village Island (another First Nations reservation). He spends his days giving tours of the abandoned Mamalilaculla village of Meem-quam-leese, which was inhabited until the 1930s. On the left he is standing in front of the "front door" of a long house. There were once over 30 long houses here, with about 20 families living in each. On the right you can see his grizzly bear necklace. How he got that is a good story. If brief, a gringo hunter wounded the griz but was afraid to track him down in the bushes, so Tom got the job. The bear got to Tom with a paw and broke a few ribs and punctured a lung, but Tom eventually came out on top. Otherwise, the bear would now be wearing a fingernail necklace.

This is the upper part of a fallen totem pole in Meem-quam-leese. This part is a wolf: the head is at the left, then you can see the two left legs, and the tail at the upper right. This part is 6-8 feet long. The log is about 3 feet in diameter.

This is a bear on the lower part of the fallen totem pole. The bear's knees are at the bottom, the upraised paws in the center, and the head at the top. The pole is from the 1800s and fell just a few years ago. It is being allowed to decay on nature's schedule. Many of the well-preserved poles in British Columbia museums came from (i.e., were stolen from) this village in the early 1900s.

Tom's two kids, Brooke and Hunter, spend their summers with Tom learning the traditional ways, legends, and Kwak'wala language. Hunter had just caught 30, 20, and 12 pound ling cod. In the winter it's off to the white man's school in Alberta.

At our last camp on Mound Island, a couple of people decided to set up their tent on the cute little knoll seen on the left. Then, six hours later at bedtime, the tide had come in and cut them off from the rest of us. They got to swim home after dinner.

After lunch on day six, a water taxi took us back to Telegraph Cove. This let us spend more time padding in new places, rather than having to retrace our previous route back. The kayaks are pulled aboard and placed on the roof rack at the stern.

This is a wilderness trip, but civilization is unfortunately often not far away. The major danger when crossing the Inside Passage route (e.g., in Johnstone Strait) is getting run over by a cruise ship. They move fast, come around corners where you can't see them coming, and aren't overly concerned about running over kayaks.